HIGHLAND HEIGHTS — When Northern Kentucky University created a College of Informatics in 2005, nobody knew quite what to make of it.

What the heck was informatics? Why did we need a college dedicated to it? What would students learn there, anyway?

As it turned out, NKU was on the cutting edge of a trend now sweeping higher education throughout the country: the study of how technology intersects with information to touch every part of our lives.

As the college grew, its influence also swept through NKU. It built relationships with other colleges and, in doing so, breathed new life into academic programs from journalism and computer science, to health care and law – and helped rekindle the flame of learning across the university.

That transdisciplinary approach has been so successful that expanding it university-wide is a core principle in NKU’s new strategic plan, “Fuel The Flame,” which was unveiled to the public on Friday.

“The success of informatics is not just what’s happening in Griffin Hall, but the way they’re collaborating with all of the other colleges. They have a tie with one or more departments in every college on our campus, including the law school,” said NKU President Geoff Mearns. “That is a success we want to replicate and expand.”

Academic innovation is a key goal of the strategic plan – Mearns used the term “innovation” more than any other during his annual January Convocation address Friday morning.

The plan also calls for helping students succeed during and after college, growing enrollment across all student types, strengthening institutional excellence, and continuing NKU’s focus on community engagement.

“Under the leadership of my predecessor, Jim Votruba, community engagement became a hallmark of this university,” Mearns said in his remarks. “Community engagement is now part of our institutional DNA.”

The plan will see NKU through to 2018, when it will turn 50 years old. It includes a new mission statement, vision and core set of values. It was developed during a yearlong process with input from thousands of students, faculty and staff as well as from the community.

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“In order for us to be competitive in an increasingly competitive environment – higher education – we need to be distinctive,” Mearns said.

The execution of the strategic plan still lies ahead, however.

Over the coming months, cross-disciplinary teams will develop specific strategies to help NKU hit those goals. A new academic master plan is also in the works to specify how the transdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning will be implemented.

Some steps have already been taken: NKU plans to hire a senior staff member to focus on making the university more diverse and inclusive, and several transdisciplinary courses have also been developed by professors outside the College of Informatics.

No dollar amount has been put on implementing the strategic plan, but it’s likely that NKU will be asking the community to dig a little deeper.

“We must generate more financial support from our alumni, from our corporate and community partners, and from our friends,” Mearns said Friday. “We must continue to demonstrate that philanthropic investments in our university can produce great returns for our students and for our region.”

NKU is also calling for a change in how the state funds universities; it wants to tie the funding to performance, an idea that has caught the interest of local lawmakers.

But it might be a tough sell to the entire legislature, as they work to craft a budget for the next two years during a time when revenue is already extremely tight. Despite that outlook, Mearns plans to aggressively push the issue in Frankfort.

“We’re going to argue for it, and that’s going to be my responsibility. I need to be the advocate and the point person,” he said. “... But frankly, if we sit and wait for another check to be delivered from Frankfort, we won’t succeed. So we’re going to work that, but on a parallel line, we’re going to work hard to succeed without that.” ⬛